11/16/15 – Robert Pape – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Check this out.
A brand new article at bostonglobe.com.
It's by Robert Pape, the director of the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Terrorism.
And he's the author of the book Dying to Win, the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, and then the sequel Cutting the Fuse, the Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you doing?
Okay.
Thanks for having me.
Very good to have you here.
And I should let the people know very briefly and oversimply, I'm sure, that you run a database of all the suicide terrorist attacks that you can find from 1980 on in a social science-y kind of a way, looking for all the parallels and common denominators and useful lessons in a way that could be beneficial for protecting Americans from terrorism.
And I guess maybe we can get back to that here in a minute, but first let's start with your article here.
Or you can clarify what I just said if you'd like as well in your answer.
Or go ahead.
I was just going to say, thanks for giving me credit, but I also want to give credit to the 30 researchers who work with me to put that database together and keep it up to date as of the last two months.
Okay, great.
And yeah, I was going to ask, are you still doing it?
And yeah, very good.
And yes, much credit to all your help on that.
Okay, so now this is, Why Paris?
The answer can be found in Syria and Iraq.
And I'm not certain I agree with you on this, Bob, but I sure do want to give you a chance to state your case first, at least.
Sure.
So ISIS itself was formed as, it's a phenomenon that was caused over 10 years ago by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
What happened in 2003 is that Iraq had no terrorist groups.
There were actually no active groups in Syria either of any note.
When they invaded and conquered Iraq, we toppled Saddam and created an anarchy.
It created an anarchy, especially in the Sunni parts of Iraq, which are in the western parts of Iraq, a space that's ungoverned to this day.
Then that spawned the terrorist group called AQI, Al Qaeda in Iraq.
And then over the last 10 years, that has morphed into ISIS.
Syria got involved because a few years ago we had the Arab Spring and that created revolts in Syria, which is right next to Iraq.
And so what ISIS is, is now the bigger, larger group of essentially Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, who have actually asked for help from foreign fighters who have been flooding into Iraq and Syria to fight with ISIS.
Okay, so now in this article, you're saying that the reason that the Islamic State is lashing out at the Europeans right now is because they're suffering major setbacks in former western Iraq and eastern Syria.
So a year ago, ISIS took Mosul, which is a big city in western Iraq, and that created a great threat to Baghdad and Erbil, which Erbil is the Kurdish area in the northeast of Iraq.
What the West did, the United States, assembled an international coalition that included the United States, France, Britain, later Turkey joined to work with local groups in Iraq and Syria, especially the Kurds and then the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, to first contain the group and then roll back its territory.
And over the last especially nine months, ISIS has lost 10% of its territory.
So it's not just that the momentum has been reversed, it's not just been contained, it's been shrinking, losing ground in Iraq and Syria.
And as a result of losing ground, it's now lashing back.
It's lashing out at the major military states that have been part of the coalition to shrink the territory of ISIS, and that's what we see.
It started actually this lashing out about six weeks ago.
The first major spectacular attack was in Ankara in Turkey on October 10th.
That was a suicide, a set of suicide bombings that killed 95 Turkish civilians.
Then on October 31st, they attacked Russia, the Russian plane, and brought down that plane, killing 224 Russians, because in the meantime, Russia has joined in attacks against ISIS.
And even though not in concert with the Americans or the West, it does pose a real threat to ISIS.
And now ISIS is attacking Paris, one of the major powers in the international coalition against it.
Right.
Okay, so here's the thing.
Obviously, you're clearly right about the pressure that's being put on the Islamic State in terms of American and combined allied and Russian air power in Syria and in Iraq, backing up the Shiite militias and what's left of the so-called Iraqi army there.
But they've taken Ramadi and they've taken Palmyra, and where they've lost Kobani, they seem to have major successes in other places.
And the Iranian and American-backed Shiite militias can't seem to do a damn thing about Ramadi, Fallujah, or Mosul, or for that matter, the Iraqi Kurds.
Peshmerga.
Scott, you're right that this hasn't been a one-way street.
You're right that there's an ebb and a flow.
And this is where maps are really helpful, and I find it really hard to – but if any of your listeners would go to a map and see where Ramadi is, you would see that what's been happening in the last year is that ISIS's perimeter has been shrinking.
They've made some small gains inside of that perimeter to kind of consolidate a piece here or there.
But just since October, the international coalition has launched a new wave of multi-pronged offensives against the group.
Just since October, one of the prongs is against Ramadi.
Another is coming down from Sinjar, which is coming down from the northeast of Iraq.
Ramadi is to the west of Baghdad.
And then another is coming down from Syria near the border, near Kobani, toward Raqqa.
And then in addition, of course, the Russians have come in from the west, closer to Damascus, threatening ISIS from yet another axis.
So you're quite right that there's been ebb and flow, and you're right that there's been some gains for ISIS.
But overall, ISIS is losing.
And that's what's causing it to spend enormous effort it was not spending before.
So in the last year and a half, ISIS has done many suicide attacks, over 600 suicide attacks, 600, you hear me, suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria.
Many of them coordinated what's called a complex attack against multiple aim points.
They haven't done anything like that in the west until the last couple months.
What's really changed is that ISIS is now devoting tremendous effort to attack Ankara, to attack the Russians, to attack in Paris, and I'm afraid we would have to expect the United States, I'm sure they're making great efforts to do that as well.
And that is a really big change, and it means that they are now devoting enormous effort, whereas before, they were essentially putting out emails and calling for lone wolves to attack small numbers of people.
So it's not that ISIS never attacked us in the last year.
It's that they'd send out a tweet, and they'd say, please go attack the United States.
And you'd get one or two lone wolves to basically on their own become self-radicalized.
I mean, there was the Charlie Hebdo, and there was the attack on the, I forgot if it was a synagogue or some Jewish institution in Brussels there, too.
Anyway, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Robert Papin in just a sec, y'all.
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Hey, finally.
Sorry, Al, I know those commercial breaks are intolerably long.
It is what it is.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Yes, technical problems with my website, technical problems with the LRN feed.
I don't know.
We're trying to get by.
Talking with Bob Pape.
He's the author of this article in the Boston Globe, Why Paris?
The Answer Can Be Found in Syria and Iraq.
And, of course, he's the author of Dying to Win and Cutting the Fuse, social science books about the origins of suicide terrorism and what all to do about it, etc., etc.
So now here's where I think I want to come at you almost 100%, Bob.
You're saying that the Islamic State is suffering major losses because of the various countries attacking them, and so they're lashing out at the Russians, at the French.
They would hit us if they could in order to get us to stop attacking them.
And I think that that's, at best, not even really half true.
In the same sense as September 11th, that a welcome response, a welcome from the point of view of the terrorists, a welcome response by the Americans to September 11th would have been, well, geez, that's what it feels like.
I guess we better quit being an empire now and leave them alone.
But that's not what they thought would happen, and that's not what they were trying to get to happen, really.
They might have been pleased by that.
But what they were banking on was provoking a reaction and overreaction and tricking the stupid Americans into driving themselves off the cliff and inflicting damage on ourselves that they cannot possibly do to us.
And it seems like in that very same sense, the Bin Ladenites of the Islamic State, they need war with us.
And now being bombed from the air, I could see that being very frustrating.
It seems to me like rather than trying to scare us away, they're trying to provoke invasion.
They want a big battle at Tabiq so they can pretend this is all magical and all destined to happen.
And, look, it's the American Christian and European Christians, the Israeli Jews and the Iranian Shiites all against us.
And that's their narrative that they're trying to push and trying to get us to overreact and play the same script.
And so what do you think of that?
So, Scott, I agree with you, and I think maybe you're not quite seeing how much that's part of what I'm saying.
So I'm not doubting at all they want us to overreact, and I don't think we should overreact.
What I'm saying is that when these groups are losing ground, they're looking for a game changer.
And they need a game changer because they're mainly trying to establish de facto sovereignty, that's what they mean by a caliphate, in very specific areas of the world.
And when they're losing ground, they want a game changer.
Well, that's actually what bin Laden wanted, too.
It wasn't so much he was losing, he couldn't get anywhere because he only had 300 guys.
So what bin Laden did was he attacked us on 9-11, hoping we would overreact and send an army into Afghanistan.
Well, actually, we didn't.
We reacted in a limited way in Afghanistan, which was, I think, the right move.
Then we blew it, and then we overreacted in a place bin Laden didn't think we would, which was Iraq.
And that is what led to all the recruits for all the anti-American and anti-Western terrorism that bin Laden couldn't drum up with his statements.
I think ISIS, we don't have the details yet.
With bin Laden, we actually have some evidence to show that's true.
With ISIS, they may want exactly the same thing.
They may be wanting to provoke us into sending 50,000 or 100,000 ground troops into Iraq and Syria so that they can mobilize many more people against us.
And the reason they need those more people to be mobilized is because they're losing.
Yeah, war is the health of the Islamic State just as any other state, I mean, unless they lose completely.
Yeah, so the right move here, which, by the way, so far, even with all the pressure, Obama's pursuing, I think, the best course.
And I'm not saying that because I'm a Democrat.
I'm actually a Republican.
The fact is, what's happening is that we are responding in a limited, determined way to continue the strategy that's winning.
And I think it would be a gross mistake to overreact and send any large number of ground forces in because what that's going to do is help the terrorists recruit like crazy.
And that's what they need right now because the current set of fighters just isn't enough to hold the ground.
Well, you know, I think there's a real problem here, Bob, that has, I think, maybe even been underestimated by the president's most right-wing critics, you know, on security and this and that.
And that is really the fact that at present you and I are living in the future compared to the years that anti-war people have been warning that America, its NATO and GCC allies have been backing the Sunni-based insurgency from Iraq War II, including al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria since 2011.
And there are uncounted thousands of Europeans and at least dozens or scores or maybe more Americans that have gone to Syria to fight.
And our governments have said, geez, we haven't really been keeping track of all these guys.
The FBI said, we don't have a folder full of all the Americans who went to Turkey to go fight in Syria or anything like that.
Geez, you think we should start looking into it?
Because our government's been pushing, both sides, Republican and Democrat, have been pushing the theory that, oh, no, we're just backing the mythical moderates and all of this stuff this whole time and that these are the good guys.
And so we could have, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to sound like a Glenn Beck, alarmist crazy or whatever, but why should we believe there are less than scores or even hundreds of sleeper Islamic State or al-Nusra terrorists embedded with the refugees fleeing to Europe for a better life, only to wait to do attacks just like what happened in Paris?
It seemed like this cow is way out of the barn right now.
You know what I mean?
Well, it seems like it's out of the barn.
And then, therefore, what we should do is just have conscription and raise a couple million men in arms to occupy Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and maybe parts of Iran.
That is just exactly what the terrorists would love to hear.
And they'd love to see us try to do that because that is really what they're hoping for is a way to really mobilize people in the region for their cause.
And it would be a big mistake.
Now, let's just also, though, be honest.
There does appear to be, of the eight attackers in Paris, it looks like one had help from at least a Syrian refugee, maybe not consciously.
Maybe the passport was stolen.
We still don't quite know the details on that.
But what we do know is that the Paris attacks were planned in Syria.
They look like they were orchestrated from Belgium and then had some help from French Muslims.
And so to the extent that the refugees were involved, they look like it was really very minor, which I don't want to say means we shouldn't ignore that.
So I don't want to ignore it.
But at the same time, it would be a gross over-reading to think that, oh, if France and Western Europe had never admitted a Syrian refugee, Paris would be safe.
That's just not the case.
The problem we face here is that, and again, this really goes back 10 plus years.
The problem is when we broke Iraq, we created an anarchy.
That anarchy has been spreading, and that is the cauldron which is producing all of this hornet's nest of terrorists.
And we have to deal with this issue.
We can't just ignore it.
And I think it means very limited use of military, along with economic and political tools, which is the direction, by the way, that the United States has been moving.
And this won't solve the problem overnight.
This is a problem that was caused by breaking Iraq into pieces, and I'm afraid it's going to be many years before we actually reach anything like an end to the anarchy that we triggered.
All right, now, I know you're an academic and not an ideology guy, but I want to make the practical case for the U.S. government just withdrawing from the Middle East forever here, because the opposite of that, what you're saying, diplomatic tools, slight military here, there, careful cooperation, this kind of thing.
In other words, the government acting like you imagine it ought to act kind of thing is impossible when what we're talking about is the previous government, the Bush administration, as you said, created this mess in the first place.
The present administration has made it that much worse by backing the rebellion in Syria all these years.
And then these are the same men that you're saying we need to hire to solve the problem.
Or if not them, I guess it's going to be Hillary or Jeb or Trump.
The same people who got us into this mess are going to be the ones to figure out this very careful mathematical solution to the problem.
Just one last real good intervention in a very careful way, and then maybe we could quit.
And what about if we just quit now?
So, first of all, I certainly understand the frustration.
And if this were in South America, if this were in Latin America, if this were in parts of Africa, the idea of just simply walking away altogether would be all too reasonable.
The reason that we're committed to the Persian Gulf is because of the West's commitment to access for oil.
I don't mean money for the oil companies.
That's another issue.
I mean that the world's economy turns on the Persian Gulf.
Now, not as much as it did 15 years ago, to be sure, but it is still the case that if we lost access to the Persian Gulf oil, our economy would be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And that would produce all kinds of ugly domestic politics that we haven't seen here in a long time.
So, the reason to try to walk this tightrope, and which I agree, very difficult, very difficult, no doubt, is because there isn't this perfect solution.
Just as trying to go in with 150,000 men didn't solve the problem because just using a bunch of military force isn't going to solve it, walking away completely isn't going to solve it either.
What we need to do is we need to walk this tightrope of a middle course, and I think that this has been made worse by heavy military intervention.
So, what I would say is that we shouldn't walk away, but neither should we succumb to calls for heavy military intervention, which would just make the matter worse.
Alright, thanks very much for your time, Bob.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely, Scott.
Great to talk to you again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Alright, so that is Robert A. Pape.
He is a professor at the University of Chicago.
He's the author of Dying to Win and Cutting the Fuse, both of which are extremely valuable.
I do hope you'll read them, and this piece is at the Boston Globe.
Why Paris?
The answer can be found in Syria and Iraq.
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